CASE STUDY: THE ROCKPORT COMPANY

On the morning of Thursday 21st October 1993, the Rockport Company, a subsidiary of Reebok International, closed for two days.  No shoes were shipped. No orders were processed. Scheduled meetings were cancelled. The head office was locked. Except for a skeleton crew left behind to answer the phones, all 350 members of Rockport's workforce, including John Thorbeck, the company's president, and his senior executives, gathered in a cavernous warehouse for a two day meeting which had no agenda. Harrison Owen stepped into the centre of the loosely-formed circle of intrigued participants to make his opening introduction. Half an hour later his briefing was complete, and it was time for people to make their offerings. It took a little while for things to get moving, but eventually one Rockport employee stepped forward, then another.

Within an hour an energised group had posted dozens of issues on the wall: distribution, on-time delivery, customer service, excess raw materials. Some topics had never before been acknowledged as issues of concern, such as women's perceptions of the Rockport environment, eliminating political games, overcoming "we vs. they" thinking, getting rid of paperwork. By the end of day two, 66 different sessions had taken place, with the number of participants ranging from five to 150 or more on the hot topics.

At one point during the event a security guard (who wasn't even a Rockport employee) happened to mention that he spent a lot of time on his feet and would love to wear the kind of comfortable shoes that Rockport made. But his company would never buy them as they didn't go with the security company's uniform. Why couldn't Rockport redesign the uppers to match the uniform? And so a new product range was born. If it is nothing more than an average performer in the market, sales will be around $20 million per year.

At the planning stage of the Open Space event Anthony Tiberii, Rockport's senior vice president and chief financial officer, had been one of its most vocal opponents. He felt that the company could not afford to lose two whole shipping days. After the event he changed his mind, and was easily able to justify the investment.